THE DESTRUCTION OF NOTRE DAME

While I am not a Christian, I appreciate church and cathedral art and architecture more than most, for I remember that while the religion is a foreign import that has been instrumental in crushing the soul of European Man, the aesthetics are indigenous to Europe and will be instrumental in its restoration. Unlike some Pagans I could mention, who in any case seem to love an even less European religion in Hindooism, I therefore have mixed feelings about the fire that has brought down the spire and roof of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. There are of course suspicions about whether the fire was started deliberately, and inevitably, we on the Right look towards those who have sought to invade and conquer Europe, whom our corrupt politicians and businessmen have now invited in willingly. Whether the incendiary is yet another Islamic atrocity is yet to be seen, and even if it is, it will probably be covered up by our equally corrupt journalists, who have become cowardly and perverse apologists for Muslim terrorists. After all, several French churches have 'accidentally' burned down in the past year, according to the press. What is clear though is that Muslims certainly see the destruction of Notre Dame as a source of amusement and joy:

 

 

Let us be clear: the reason they find such happiness in Notre Dame's destruction is that it represents one of the great edifices of Europe, one of the great structures they did not create. It is the destruction of a structure that is alien to them, in both its religiosity, its cultural history and its aesthetics. As regards its religiosity, one must remember that this is not the first place of worship to be built on this spot: the site was originally a Roman Pagan temple, before a Romanesque church replaced it and its religion. The church was then replaced by the present cathedral, with design and construction work starting after Maurice de Sully became Bishop of Paris in 1160. One must remember though that the Pagan temple too was consecrated to gods foreign to the native Gallic Parisii tribe, who were conquered in the aftermath of the Battle of Alésia, where the Parisii fought under Vercingetorix, who had unified the Celtic tribes against the rapacious Roman Empire and ultimately lost. The temple was therefore a monument to the triumph of the imperial gods and to the Celts' subjugation.

 

When Christianity swept the Roman Empire, it also swept away much of the culture of the previous ethnic and imperial religions, but also absorbed some of it. Over time, the European influence has waned, while the Semitic has waxed, particularly in terms of morality. This is why a stronger religion with harsher morality is pushing it aside. When was the last time a mosque was burnt down by Christians? This is not to give praise to Islam, for that is also an alien slave religion in a different way. Even if the Notre Dame fire turns out not to be arson, how often have we seen Muslims burn churches and kill Christians with impunity? Christianity is dying and always was from its very beginning, in its worship of a dying passive hero. And that hero himself is not even European, but Semitic. And thus does it really matter if one Semitic religion - that of Islam - comes to destroy another? In a way, it does. 

 

 

 

While people who call themselves Pagans like Kristian 'Varg' Vikernes and Carolyn Emeroid (the latter infatuated with the Brown Man cult of Hindooism) claim to see no difference between Christianity and Islam, there are indeed marked and obvious ethno-cultural differences. Islam would not just sweep away the Semitic religiosity and morality of Christianity and replace it with another one - Arab rather than Jewish - but sweep away the remnants of the European culture and aesthetics. One only has to look at the alien and alienating aesthetics of a mosque to see that this is true. In his novel The Flying Inn, the great Rightist and latterly Christian man of letters G K Chesterton predicted that a corrupt liberal elite would invite a Muslim takeover of Britain and that a new synthesis of Christianity and Islam called Chrislam would become the religion of the new order. He somewhat overlooked the fact that Islam does not tend to synthesise other cultures, but destroy them and replace them. Equally, the difference between Christianisation and Islamification is that the native conquered population tend to be bred out to a greater or lesser degree through forced miscegenation. If there were no European peoples, there would be no European culture.

 

 

The death of Christianity can be looked at two ways. One can look at it nostalgically or one can see it as I do, as an opportunity to go forward onto greater glories, free from the spiritual shackles that have held us back for so long. The person above, dismayed about the destruction of the cathedral, looks only to the past and negates the idea that we can not only create a structure the equal of Notre Dame, but surpass it. It is a cancerous idea. It is a Christian idea, the idea of constant fall from grace, of constant decline until 'the Messiah' comes. In any case, York Minster suffered a fire in 1984 and was fully restored, and it must be remembered that by the early nineteenth century Notre Dame too was in a terrible state of disrepair, after the ravages of Huguenot Christian fundamentalist terrorism and Jacobin liberal terrorism, plus a few riots. Ironically, its restoration and improvements from 1844 onwards by architects Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus owe much to renewed interest in the cathedral following the publication of his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831. Ironically because Hugo often showed antipathy towards the Roman Catholic Church, which placed several of his works on their banned list. The French title is the eponymous cathedral itself: Notre-Dame de Paris, which shows Hugo's own concerns with the importance of architecture, which he had throughout his life:

 

L'architecture est le grand livre de l'humanité, l'expression principale de l'homme à ses divers états de développement, soit comme force, soit comme intelligence.

 

Inspirons, s'il est possible, à la nation l'amour de l'architecture nationale. C'est là, l'auteur le déclare, un des buts principaux de ce livre ; c'est là un des buts principaux de sa vie.

 

As an aside, while we are discussing the novel, Disney's animated interpretation displays the new post-Christion religion and Cult of the Other in its portayal of Esmeralda, who, we remember in the novel, is not a gypsy herself, but is a native French girl who was abducted by gypsies. The green eyes are fine and are in keeping with her name, but the darkened skin is a deliberate subversion by (((Michael Eisner's))) version of Disney. Yet is this new Semitic Cult of the Other not merely an extension of the prior Semitic Cult of the Other of Christianity? 

 

 

The part of me that mourned the loss - or temporary loss - of Notre Dame Cathedral, then, was the part that loves the aesthetics. The edifice is Gothic, which is not just a quinessentially European style, but a quintessentially North European one. In spite of the religion (which one also notes forbids the graven image, hence the early Protestants' vandalism of statues and artworks), European aesthetics have triumphed, like those evolved from the Pagan temples of Europe, like the one that existed at Uppsala (see artist's impression below). If the European aesthetics give us spiritual strength, think how much re-embracing our ethnic religions would give us. Gods who look like us and whose ways are our ways stop the probability of succeeding generations of 'Europeans' resembling Disney's Esmeralda. Fortunately, new Pagan temples are springing up, like the one in Faaborg, Denmark (bottom). Unfortunately, the one being built in Reykjavik, Iceland, has been designed in postmodernist aesthetics. It seems there are always those of us trying to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory, and these are the real enemy. Equally though, the Odinist Temple in Newark, England, is a converted sixteenth-century chapel, which shows us the way forward in reclaiming our art and architecture from a foreign theology.